REVIEW: The Legend of Legacy


Title	The Legend of Legacy
Developer	Furyu, Grezzo
Publisher	Atlus USA
Release Date	October 13th, 2015
Genre	RPG
Platform	3DS Family
Age Rating	E10
Official Website

When I first saw The Legend of Legacy, I was very impressed by its visual style. It looked like a pop-up story book come to life on the 3DS. Being that it is a spiritual successor to the well known Saga series, I was expecting quite a challenge. It had been a long time since I challenged myself, so I thought I would give this a spin. Let’s see how it turned out.

The story follows seven different adventurers exploring the lands of Avalon. They are each looking for something different. For instance, a young girl seeks to find her memory, a Templar Knight seeks to find her “God,” and a treasure hunter is seeking riches. Things change when the adventurers uncover some Singing Stones that tell the tattered story of this mysterious land. It took me around 30 hours to complete the Templar’s story, and depending on which character you choose at the beginning of the game, the story will be quite different. Though honestly, they are all pretty plain.

This is one of the best looking games on the 3DS console by far. The chibi character designs along with the pop up story book look make this all visually pleasing. The environments are nicely detailed and the 3D effect on the console makes this even better. The character models are nicely done as well. Though the character’s look doesn’t change with new armor, there are a variety of weapons and shields that give the characters a unique look.

The music is fantastic and really sets the mood for an adventure. Each area has a different tune and you will likely find yourself humming along as you explore. The battle themes are nicely done in that traditional RPG style and will get you pumped for some combat. There’s not a lot of VA or unique sound effects to speak of here, but there’s nothing really out of place either.

The gameplay begins with you in town. From here, you go do all the basic things you expect such as stay at the inn, shop, and recruit party members. You can recruit all seven of the main characters regardless of whom you pick to start with. Each character will have proficiency with certain weapons and magics. The game doesn’t let you know however, so you will have to use a bit of trial and error. You will have to return to the inn to change out characters or save the game. The shop will get shipments of different items in periodically. Most of the time, these will not be as good as what you need, but never fear, you can send the ship out on a trade mission. There are different amounts you can spend on these expeditions and you will receive random items in return. These are usually pretty decent weapons and armor. Expeditions take place in real time, usually two or three hours, and this time can be reduced with street passes.

The basic premise here is to explore each area, activating the Singing Stones to acquire more magic and restore the elemental temples. When you complete the map of an area you can sell it at the shop. You will want to complete the maps 100% before you sell them to get the best price and you can only sell a map of each area once. While this doesn’t sound tedious, the fact is there are many hazards on each map that will damage your HP permanently until you go back to inn and rest. There are also uber monsters on the map that you can see in most cases, but always magically manage to get you in an encounter which you have little chance of winning. And if you run, you have start back on the first screen on that area, making this ridiculous at times.

The combat is really straightforward, old school turn based RPG all the way. However they do add the ability to set up different formations to spice things up a bit, though really they boil down to straight attack, defense, and support. EXP is not gained at the end of battle, instead your characters level up like they did in Final Fantasy 2. If a character takes a lot of damage they will gain HP, use a lot of magic they get some SP, and so on. Getting characters up to a reasonable level to handle monsters takes a ton of grinding. I’m not usually opposed to grinding in an RPG — it comes with the territory — but this is a bit much. Especially when you factor in that some enemies can permanently damage your HP, forcing you to grind it back up again. The last issue I have with combat is the enemies almost always go first. I feel like I went back 20 years playing this; it’s artificial difficulty at its finest.

Each weapon has a different set of skills. These are gained by simply attacking with that weapon or using another skill over and over again. This actually seems to level up faster than your HP and SP for some reason. You can equip any weapon or magic on any character, however if they are not proficient with them, it will take them much longer to learn new skills or level them up.

While I can’t say I enjoyed my time with The Legend of Legacy, I know that fans of old school style RPG that want to challenge themselves will love this. I feel the game is difficult for all the wrong reasons and the story wasn’t engaging enough to really get me into the game. At the $39.99 price tag I could only recommend this one to hardcore RPG buffs that like a brutally difficult adventure.